Shakespeare's England Part 3

His inclination, probably, was toward the Roman Catholic church, because of the poetry that is in it: but such a man as Shakespeare would have viewed all religious beliefs in a kindly spirit, and would have made no emphatic professions. The Will was executed on March 25, 1616. It covers three sheets of paper; it is not in Shakespeare's hand-writing, but each sheet bears his signature. It is in the British Museum.

Once again there is a sound of organ music, very low and soft, in Stratford Church, and the dim light, broken by the richly stained windows, streams across the dusky chancel, filling the still air with opal haze and flooding those gray gravestones with its mellow radiance.

Not a word is spoken; but, at intervals, the rustle of the leaves is audible in a sighing wind. What visions are these, that suddenly fill the region! What royal faces of monarchs, proud with power, or pallid with anguis.h.!.+ What sweet, imperial women, gleeful with happy youth and love, or wide-eyed and rigid in tearless woe! What warriors, with serpent diadems, defiant of death and h.e.l.l! The mournful eyes of Hamlet; the wild countenance of Lear; Ariel with his harp, and Prospero with his wand! Here is no death! All these, and more, are immortal shapes; and he that made them so, although his mortal part be but a handful of dust in yonder crypt, is a glorious angel beyond the stars.

Ill.u.s.tration: "Distant View of Stratford."

CHAPTER IX

LONDON NOOKS AND CORNERS

Those persons upon whom the spirit of the past has power--and it has not power upon every mind!--are aware of the mysterious charm that invests certain familiar spots and objects, in all old cities. London, to observers of this cla.s.s, is a never-ending delight. Modern cities, for the most part, reveal a definite and rather a commonplace design. Their main avenues are parallel. Their shorter streets bisect their main avenues. They are diversified with rectangular squares. Their configuration, in brief, suggests the sapient, utilitarian forethought of the land-surveyor and civil engineer. The ancient British capital, on the contrary, is the expression--slowly and often narrowly made--of many thousands of characters. It is a city that has happened--and the stroller through the old part of it comes continually upon the queerest imaginable alleys, courts, and nooks. Not far from Drury Lane Theatre, for instance, hidden away in a clump of dingy houses, is a dismal little graveyard--the same that d.i.c.kens has chosen, in his novel of _Bleak House, _as the sepulchre of little Jo's friend, the first love of the unfortunate Lady Dedlock. It is a doleful spot, draped in the robes of faded sorrow, and crowded into the twilight of obscurity by the thick-cl.u.s.tering habitations of men. The Cripplegate church, St.

Giles's, a less lugubrious spot and less difficult of access, is nevertheless strangely sequestered, so that it also affects the observant eye as equally one of the surprises of London. I saw it, for the first time, on a gray, sad Sunday, a little before twilight, and when the service was going on within its venerable walls. The footsteps of John Milton were sometimes on the threshold of the Cripplegate, and his grave is in the nave of that ancient church. A simple flat stone marks that sacred spot, and many a heedless foot tramples over that hallowed dust. From Golden Lane, which is close by, you can see the tower of this church; and, as you walk from the place where Milton lived to the place where his ashes repose, you seem, with a solemn, awe-stricken emotion, to be actually following in his funeral train. At St. Giles's occurred the marriage of Cromwell. I remembered--as I stood there and conjured up that scene of golden joy and hope--the place of the Lord Protector's coronation in Westminster Hall; the place, still marked, in Westminster Abbey, where his body was buried; and old Temple Bar, on which (if not on Westminster Hall) his mutilated corse was finally exposed to the blind rage of the fickle populace. A little time--a very little time--serves to gather up equally the happiness and the anguish, the conquest and the defeat, the greatness and the littleness of human life, and to cover them all with silence.

That place has been renovated and is no longer a disgrace.

The church of St. Giles was built in 1117 by Queen Maud. It was demolished in 1623 and rebuilt in 1731. The tomb of Richard Pendrell, who saved Charles the Second, after Worcester fight, in 1651, is in the churchyard.

But not always with oblivion. Those quaint churches, and many other mouldering relics of the past, in London, are haunted with a.s.sociations that never can perish out of remembrance. In fact the whole of the old city impresses you as densely invested with an atmosphere of human experience, dark, sad, and lamentable. Walking, alone, in ancient quarters of it, after midnight, I was aware of the oppressive sense of tragedies that have been acted and misery that has been endured in its dusky streets and melancholy houses. They do not err who say that the spiritual life of man leaves its influence in the physical objects by which he is surrounded. Night-walks in London will teach you that, if they teach you nothing else. I went more than once into Brooke Street, Holborn, and traced the desolate footsteps of poor Thomas Chatterton to the scene of his self-murder and agonised, pathetic, deplorable death.

It is more than a century (1770), since that "marvellous boy" was driven to suicide by neglect, hunger, and despair. They are tearing down the houses on one side of Brooke Street now (1877); it is doubtful which house was No. 4, in the attic of which Chatterton died, and doubtful whether it remains: his grave--a pauper's grave, that was made in a workhouse burial-ground, in Shoe Lane, long since obliterated--is unknown; but his presence hovers about that region; his strange and touching story tinges its commonness with the mystical moonlight of romance; and his name is blended with it for ever.

Ill.u.s.tration: "Whitehall Gateway."

On another night I walked from St. James's Palace to Whitehall (the York Place of Cardinal Wolsey), and viewed the ground that Charles the First must have traversed, on his way to the scaffold. The story of the slaughter of that king, always sorrowful to remember, is very grievous to consider, when you realise, upon the actual scene of his ordeal and death, his exalted fort.i.tude and his bitter agony. It seemed as if I could almost hear his voice, as it sounded on that fateful morning, asking that his body might be more warmly clad, lest, in the cold January air, he should s.h.i.+ver, and so, before the eyes of his enemies, should seem to be trembling with fear. The Puritans, having brought that poor man to the place of execution, kept him in suspense from early morning till after two o'clock in the day, while they debated over a proposition to spare his life--upon any condition they might choose to make--that had been sent to them by his son, Prince Charles. Old persons were alive in London, not very long ago, who remembered having seen, in their childhood, the window, in the end of the Whitehall Banquet House--now a Chapel Royal and all that remains of the ancient palace--through which the doomed monarch walked forth to the block. It was long ago walled up, and the palace has undergone much alteration since the days of the Stuarts. In the rear of Whitehall stands a bronze statue of James the Second, by Roubiliac (whose marbles are numerous, in the Abbey and elsewhere in London, and whose grave is in the church of St. Martin), one of the most graceful works of that spirited sculptor.

The figure is finely modelled. The face is dejected and full of reproach. The right hand points, with a truncheon, toward the earth. It is impossible to mistake the ruminant, melancholy meaning of this memorial; and equally it is impossible to walk without both thought that instructs and emotion that elevates through a city which thus abounds with traces of momentous incident and representative experience.

The literary pilgrim in London has this double advantage--that while he communes with the past he may enjoy in the present. Yesterday and to-day are commingled here, in a way that is almost ludicrous. When you turn from Roubiliac's statue of James your eyes rest upon the retired house of Disraeli. If you walk in Whitehall, toward the Palace of Westminster, some friend may chance to tell you how the great Duke of Wellington walked there, in the feebleness of his age, from the Horse Guards to the House of Lords; and with what pleased complacency the old warrior used to boast of his skill in threading a crowded thoroughfare,--unaware that the police, acting by particular command, protected his revered person from errant cabs and pus.h.i.+ng pedestrians. As I strolled one day past Lambeth Palace it happened that the palace gates were suddenly unclosed and that His Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury came forth, on horseback, from that episcopal residence, and ambled away towards the House of Lords. It is the same arched portal through which, in other days, pa.s.sed out the stately train of Wolsey. It is the same towered palace that Queen Elizabeth looked upon as her barge swept past, on its watery track to Richmond. It is for ever a.s.sociated with the memory of Thomas Cromwell.

Ill.u.s.tration: "Lambeth Palace."

In the church, hard by, rest the ashes of men distinguished in the most diverse directions--Jackson, the clown; and Tenison, the archbishop, the "honest, prudent, laborious, and benevolent" primate of William the Third, who was thought worthy to succeed in office the ill.u.s.trious Tillotson. The cure of souls is sought here with just as vigorous energy as when Tillotson wooed by his goodness and charmed by his winning eloquence. Not a great distance from this spot you come upon the college at Dulwich that Edward Alleyn founded, in the time of Shakespeare, and that still subsists upon the old actor's endowment. It is said that Alleyn--who was a man of fortune, and whom a contemporary epigram styles the best actor of his day--gained the most of his money by the exhibition of bears. But, howsoever gained, he made a good use of it.

His tomb is in the centre of the college. Here may be seen one of the best picture-galleries in England. One of the cherished paintings in that collection is the famous portrait, by Sir Joshua Reynolds, of Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse--remarkable for its colour, and splendidly expositive of the boldness of feature, brilliancy of countenance, and stately grace of posture for which its original was distinguished. Another represents two renowned beauties of their day--the Linley sisters--who became Mrs. Sheridan and Mrs. Tickel. You do not wonder, as you look on those fair faces, sparkling with health, arch with merriment, lambent with sensibility, and soft with goodness and feeling, that Sheridan should have fought duels for such a prize as the lady of his love; or that those fascinating creatures, favoured alike by the Graces and the Muse, should in their gentle lives have been, "like Juno's swans, coupled and inseparable." Mary, Mrs. Tickel, died first; and Moore, in his _Life of Sheridan, _has preserved a lament for her, written by Eliza, Mrs. Sheridan, which--for deep, true sorrow and melodious eloquence--is worthy to be named with Thomas Tickel's monody on Addison or Cowper's memorial lines on his mother's picture:--

"Shall all the wisdom of the world combined Erase thy image, Mary, from my mind, Or bid me hope from others to receive The fond affection thou alone couldst give?

Ah no, my best beloved, thou still shalt be My friend, my sister, all the world to me!"

Precious also among the gems of the Dulwich gallery are certain excellent specimens of the gentle, dreamy style of Murillo. The pilgrim pa.s.ses on, by a short drive, to Sydenham, and dines at the Crystal Palace--and still he finds the faces of the past and the present confronted, in a manner that is almost comic. Nothing could be more aptly representative of the practical, ostentatious phase of the spirit of to-day than is this enormous, opulent, and glittering "palace made of windows." Yet I saw there the carriage in which Napoleon Buonaparte used to drive, at St. Helena--a vehicle as sombre and ghastly as were the broken fortunes of its death-stricken master; and, sitting at a table close by, I saw the son of Buonaparte's fiery champion, William Hazlitt.

Ill.u.s.tration: "Dulwich College."

It was a gray and misty evening. The plains below the palace terraces were veiled in shadow, through which, here and there, twinkled the lights of some peaceful villa. Far away the spires and domes of London, dimly seen, pierced the city's nightly pall of smoke. It was a dream too sweet to last. It ended when all the illuminations were burnt out; when the myriads of red and green and yellow stars had fallen; and all the silver fountains had ceased to play.

Ill.u.s.tration: "The Crown Inn, Dulwich."

CHAPTER X

RELICS OF LORD BYRON

The Byron Memorial Loan Collection, that was displayed at the Albert Memorial Hall, for a short time in the summer of 1877, did not attract much attention: yet it was a vastly impressive show of relics. The catalogue names seventy-four objects, together with thirty-nine designs for a monument to Byron. The design that has been chosen presents a seated figure, of the young sailor-boy type. The right hand supports the chin; the left, resting on the left knee, holds an open book and a pencil. The dress consists of a loose s.h.i.+rt, open at the throat and on the bosom, a flowing neckcloth, and wide, marine trousers. Byron's dog, Boatswain--commemorated in the well-known misanthropic epitaph--

"To mark a friend's remains these stones arise, I never knew but one, and here he lies"--

is shown, in effigy, at the poet's feet. The treatment of the subject, in this model, certainly deserves to be called free, but the general effect of the work is finical. The statue will probably be popular; but it will give no adequate idea of the man. Byron was both ma.s.sive and intense; and this image is no more than the usual hero of nautical romance. (It was dedicated in May, 1880, and it stands in Hamilton Gardens, near Hyde Park Corner, London.)

It was the treasure of relics, however, and not the statuary, that more attracted notice. The relics were exhibited in three gla.s.s cases, exclusive of large portraits. It is impossible to make the reader--supposing him to revere this great poet's genius and to care for his memory--feel the thrill of emotion that was aroused by actual sight, and almost actual touch, of objects so intimately a.s.sociated with the living Byron. Five pieces of his hair were shown, one of which was cut off, after his death, by Captain Trelawny--the remarkable gentleman who says that he uncovered the legs of the corse, in order to ascertain the nature and extent of their deformity. All those locks of hair are faded and all present a mixture of gray and auburn. Byron's hair was not, seemingly, of a fine texture, and it turned gray early in life. Those tresses were lent to the exhibition by Lady Dorchester, John Murray, H.

M. Robinson, D.D., and E. J. Trelawny. A strangely interesting memorial was a little locket of plain gold, shaped like a heart, that Byron habitually wore. Near to this was the crucifix found in his bed at Missolonghi, after his death. It is about ten inches long and is made of ebony. A small bronze figure of Christ is displayed upon it, and at the feet of the figure are cross-bones and a skull, of the same metal. A gla.s.s beaker, that Byron gave to his butler, in 1815, attracted attention by its portly size and, to the profane fancy, hinted that his lords.h.i.+p had formed a liberal estimate of that butler's powers of suction. Four articles of head-gear occupied a prominent place in one of the cabinets. Two are helmets that Byron wore when he was in Greece, in 1824--and very queer must have been his appearance when he wore them.

One is light blue, the other dark green; both are faded; both are fierce with bra.s.s ornaments and barbaric with bra.s.s scales like those of a snake. A comelier object is the poet's "boarding-cap"--a leather slouch, turned up with green velvet and studded with bra.s.s nails. Many small articles of Byron's property were scattered through the cases. A corpulent little silver watch, with Arabic numerals upon its face, and a meerschaum pipe, not much coloured, were among them. The cap that he sometimes wore, during the last years of his life,--the one depicted in a well-known sketch of him by Count D'Orsay,--was exhibited, and so was D'Orsay's portrait. The cap is of green velvet, not much tarnished, and is encircled by a gold band and faced by an ugly visor. The face in the sketch is supercilious and defiant. A better, and obviously truer sketch is that made by Cattermole, which also was in this exhibition. Strength in despair and a dauntless spirit that s.h.i.+nes through the ravages of irremediable suffering are the qualities of this portrait; and they make it marvellously effective. Thorwaldsen's fine bust of Byron, made for Hobhouse, and also the celebrated Phillips portrait--that Scott said was the best likeness of Byron ever painted--occupied places in this group.

The copy of the New Testament that Lady Byron gave to her husband, and that he, in turn, presented to Lady Caroline Lamb, was there, and is a pocket volume, bound in black leather, with the inscription, "From a sincere and anxious friend," written in a stiff, formal hand, across the fly-leaf. A gold ring that the poet constantly wore, and the collar of his dog Boatswain--a discoloured band of bra.s.s, with sharply jagged edges--should also be named as among the most interesting of the relics.

But the most remarkable objects of all were the ma.n.u.scripts. These comprise the original draft of the third canto of "Childe Harold,"

written on odd bits of paper, during Byron's journey from London to Venice, in 1816; the first draft of the fourth canto, together with a clean copy of it; the notes to "Marino Faliero"; the concluding stage directions--much scrawled and blotted--in "Heaven and Earth"; a doc.u.ment concerning the poet's matrimonial trouble; and about fifteen of his letters. The pa.s.sages seen are those beginning "Since my young days of pa.s.sion, joy, or pain"; "To bear unhurt what time cannot abate"; and in canto fourth the stanzas 118 to 129 inclusive. The writing is free and strong, and it still remains legible although the paper is yellow with age. Altogether those relics were touchingly significant of the strange, dark, sad career of a wonderful man. Yet, as already said, they attracted but little notice. The memory of Byron seems darkened, as with the taint of lunacy. "He did strange things," one Englishman said to me; "and there was something queer about him." The London house in which he was born, in Holies Street, Cavendish Square, is marked with a tablet,--according to a custom inst.i.tuted by a society of arts. (It was torn down in 1890 and its site is now occupied by a shop, bearing the name of John Lewis & Co.) Two houses in which he lived, No. 8 St. James Street, near the old palace, and No. 139 Piccadilly, are not marked. The house of his birth was occupied in 1877 by a descendant of Elizabeth Fry, the philanthropist.

The custom of marking the houses a.s.sociated with great names is obviously a good one, and it ought to be adopted in other countries. Two buildings, one in Westminster and one in the grounds of the South Kensington Museum, bear the name of Franklin; and I also saw memorial tablets to Dryden and Burke in Gerrard Street, to Dryden in Fetter Lane, to Mrs. Siddons in Baker Street, to Sir Joshua Reynolds and to Hogarth in Leicester Square, to Garrick in the Adelphi Terrace, to Louis Napoleon, and to many other renowned individuals. The room that Sir Joshua occupied as a studio is now an auction mart. The stone stairs leading up to it are much worn, but they remain as they were when, it may be imagined, Burke, Johnson, Goldsmith, Langton, Beauclerk, and Boswell walked there, on many a festive night in the old times.

It is a breezy, slate-coloured evening in July. I look from the window of a London house that fronts a s.p.a.cious park. Those great elms, which in their wealth of foliage and irregular and pompous expanse of limb are finer than all other trees of their cla.s.s, fill the prospect, and nod and murmur in the wind. Through a rift in their heavy-laden boughs is visible a long vista of green field, in which many children are at play.

Their laughter and the rustle of leaves, with now and then the click cf a horse's hoofs upon the road near by, make up the music of this hallowed hour. The sky is a little overcast but not gloomy. As I muse upon this delicious scene the darkness slowly gathers, the stars come out, and presently the moon rises, and blanches the meadow with silver light. Such has been the English summer, with scarce a hint of either heat or storm.

Ill.u.s.tration: "Oriel Window."

CHAPTER XI

WESTMINSTER ABBEY

It is strange that the life of the past, in its unfamiliar remains and fading traces, should so far surpa.s.s the life of the present, in impressive force and influence. Human characteristics, although manifested under widely different conditions, were the same in old times that they are now. It is not in them, surely, that we are to seek for the mysterious charm that hallows ancient objects and the historical antiquities of the world. There is many a venerable, weather-stained church in London, at sight of which your steps falter and your thoughts take a wistful, melancholy turn--though then you may not know either who built it, or who has wors.h.i.+pped in it, or what dust of the dead is mouldering in its vaults. The spirit which thus instantly possesses and controls you is not one of a.s.sociation, but is inherent in the place.

Time's shadow on the works of man, like moonlight on a landscape, gives only graces to the view--tingeing them, the while, with sombre sheen--and leaves all blemishes in darkness. This may suggest the reason that relics of bygone years so sadly please and strangely awe us, in the pa.s.sing moment; or it may be that we involuntarily contrast their apparent permanence with our own evanescent mortality, and so are dejected with a sentiment of dazed helplessness and solemn grief. This sentiment it is--allied to bereaved love and a natural wish for remembrance after death--that has filled Westminster Abbey, and many another holy mausoleum, with sculptured memorials of the departed; and this, perhaps, is the subtle power that makes us linger beside them, "with thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls."

Ill.u.s.tration: "Westminster Abbey, from the Triforium."

When the gentle angler Izaak Walton went into Westminster Abbey to visit the grave of Casaubon, he scratched his initials on the scholar's monument, where the record, "I. W., 1658," may still be read by the stroller in Poets' Corner. One might well wish to follow that example, and even thus to a.s.sociate his name with the great cathedral. And not in pride but in humble reverence! Here if anywhere on earth self-a.s.sertion is rebuked and human eminence set at nought. Among all the impressions that crowd upon the mind in this wonderful place that which oftenest recurs and longest remains is the impression of man's individual insignificance. This is salutary, but it is also dark. There can be no enjoyment of the Abbey till, after much communion with the spirit of the place, your soul is soothed by its beauty rather than overwhelmed by its majesty, and your mind ceases from the vain effort to grasp and interpret its tremendous meaning. You cannot long endure, and you never can express, the sense of grandeur that is inspired by Westminster Abbey; but, when at length its shrines and tombs and statues become familiar, when its chapels, aisles, arches, and cloisters are grown companionable, and you can stroll and dream undismayed "through rows of warriors and through walks of kings," there is no limit to the pensive memories they awaken and the poetic fancies they prompt.

Ill.u.s.tration: "Henry VII. Chapel."

In this church are buried, among generations of their n.o.bles and courtiers, fourteen monarchs of England--beginning with the Saxon Sebert and ending with George the Second. Fourteen queens rest here, and many children of the royal blood who never came to the throne. Here, confronted in a haughty rivalry of solemn pomp, rise the equal tombs of Elizabeth Tudor and Mary Stuart. Queen Eleanor's dust is here, and here, too, is the dust of the grim Queen Mary. In one little chapel you may pace, with but half a dozen steps, across the graves of Charles the Second, William and Mary, and Queen Anne and her consort Prince George.

At the tomb of Henry the Fifth you may see the helmet, s.h.i.+eld, and saddle that were worn by the valiant young king at Agincourt; and close by--on the tomb of Margaret Woodeville, daughter of Edward the Fourth--the sword and s.h.i.+eld that were borne, in royal state, before the great Edward the Third, five hundred years ago. The princes who are said to have been murdered in the Tower are commemorated here by an altar, set up by Charles the Second, whereon the inscription--blandly and almost humorously oblivious of the incident of Cromwell--states that it was erected in the thirtieth year of Charles's reign. Richard the Second, deposed and a.s.sa.s.sinated, is here entombed; and within a few feet of him are the relics of his uncle, the able and powerful Duke of Gloster, treacherously ensnared and betrayed to death. Here also, huge, rough, and gray, is the stone sarcophagus of Edward the First, which, when opened, in 1771, disclosed the skeleton of departed majesty, still perfect, wearing robes of gold tissue and crimson velvet, and having a crown on the head and a sceptre in the hand. So sleep, in jewelled darkness and gaudy decay, what once were monarchs! And all around are great lords, holy prelates, famous statesmen, renowned soldiers, and ill.u.s.trious poets. Burleigh, Pitt, Fox, Burke, Canning, Newton, Barrow, Wilberforce--names forever glorious!--are here enshrined in the grandest sepulchre on earth.

The interments that have been effected in and around the Abbey since the remote age of Edward the Confessor must number thousands; but only about six hundred are named in the guide-books. In the south transept, which is Poets' Corner, rest Chaucer, Spenser, Drayton, Cowley, Dryden, Beaumont, Davenant, Prior, Gay, Congreve, Rowe, Dr. Johnson, Campbell, Macaulay, and d.i.c.kens. Memorials to many other poets and writers have been ranged on the adjacent walls and pillars; but these are among the authors that were actually buried in this place. Ben Jonson is not here, but--in an upright posture, it is said--under the north aisle of the Abbey; Addison is in the chapel of Henry the Seventh, at the foot of the monument of Charles Montague, the great Earl of Halifax; and Bulwer is in the chapel of St. Edmund. Garrick, Sheridan, Henderson, c.u.mberland, Handel, Parr, Sir Archibald Campbell, and the once so mighty Duke of Argyle are almost side by side; while in St. Edward's chapel sleep Anne of Cleves, the divorced wife of Henry the Eighth, and Anne Neville, queen of Richard the Third.

Ill.u.s.tration: "Chapel of Edward the Confessor."

Betterton and Spranger Barry are in the cloisters--where may be read, in four little words, the most touching epitaph in the Abbey: "Jane Lister--dear child." There are no monuments to either Byron, Sh.e.l.ley, Swift, Pope, Bolingbroke, Keats, Cowper, Moore, or Young; but Mason and Shadwell are commemorated; and Barton Booth is splendidly inurned; while hard by, in the cloisters, a place was found for Mrs. Cibber, Tom Brown, Anne Bracegirdle, Anne Oldfield, and Aphra Behn. The destinies have not always been stringently fastidious as to the admission of lodgers to this sacred ground. The pilgrim is startled by some of the names that he finds in Westminster Abbey, and pained by reflection on the absence of some that he will seek in vain. Yet he will not fail to moralise, as he strolls in Poets' Corner, upon the inexorable justice with which time repudiates fict.i.tious reputations and twines the laurel on only the worthiest brows. In well-nigh five hundred years of English literature there have lived only about a hundred and ten poets whose names survive in any needed chronicle; and not all of those possess life outside of the library. To muse over the literary memorials in the Abbey is also to think upon the seeming caprice of chance with which the graves of the British poets have been scattered far and wide throughout the land.